Jim Shepherd: Hillary Gives NRA Last Word

The Shooting Wire's Jim Shepherd ended today's edition with a wrap-up of the NRA Annual Meeting and started with a pronouncement that something that happened hundreds of miles away from Nashville may do more to unite the NRA's membership than the upbeat positive event that just ended:

As the one hundred and forty-fourth annual meeting of the National Rifle Association wrapped up in Nashville, Tennessee's Music City Center yesterday, one of the most galvanizing actions for the NRA's membership took place hundreds of miles away.

With Hillary Clinton's virtual announcement of her formal candidacy for president, the NRA and the many Second Amendment groups in attendance finally have the face of the anti-gun movement firmly fixed in their political sights. As the parade of potential Republican presidential candidates rolled (slowly) across the stage on Friday, many of them took pointed shots at President Obama's record, but others took advantage of the opportunity to let the NRA faithful in attendance know they were ready for "Madame Clinton" when her apparently inevitable other shoe was once again digitally tossed into the ring with considerably less invective than a rumored ashtray was passed to her husband in the White House.

We've been down this road before where we focus on defeating Hillary Clinton and ended up with someone as bad if not worse.  In 2008 most anyone would have said that Clinton was going to be the Democrat nominee. She had the early start, the popular (among Democrats at least) former president husband, and it looked like she could not be beat.  Sound familiar?  So you can excuse me when I heard a focus on Hillary at Friday's NRA-ILA Leadership Conference as maybe just a little bit of déjà vu.


With no other announced candidate on the Democratic side of the race, it makes sense to focus on the known.  There is talk however that former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley may jump in an that he would possibly run to Hillary's left (as if that is possible).  His record on Second Amendment issues are just as bad.  Let's hope this year, if there ends up being a competitive Democratic primary race, we will get the word out on how each of the candidates stand on our issue.  Because, as more than one person has noted, the more people who see Hillary, the less they like her.